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rickr

286 karma · joined December 3, 2010

email: rick@rudelinux.org website: http://rickre.in

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rickr; my proof: https://keybase.io/rickr/sigs/yyPZLyokzoBqe51o-Q1vWYH1EfXG5CAKeuSA-3HCUBw ]

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rickr··on Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?
Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial (https://www.railstutorial.org/) is a great example of this.

It'll run you through building a twitter clone and introduce you to git, heroku, a bit of CSS/HTML, and even goes into AJAX a bit.

I can't recommend it enough to people looking to get into rails.

rickr··on Ask HN: Docker, Kubernetes, Openshift, etc – how do you deploy your products?
I've been working on creating a platform for a non profit to get veterans coding (http://operationcode.org/). We're a slack based community and have been rolling out some home grown slack bots and we currently have a rails app hosted on heroku. Managing and keeping track of the different apps was getting unwieldy so in an effort to consolidate our apps and reduce costs I evaluated a few different options. I ended up going with rancher and after working with it a bit I'm pretty happy.

I have github hooked up to travis. When a new PR (or commit) is pushed travis shoves the app into its container, and runs the test suite inside the container.

If that passes AND the branch is master we push the image to docker hub. As of now we manually update the app inside of rancher but I think automating that will be a simple API call. Once we get more stable I'll be investigating that.

I still haven't quite figured out secret management but outside of that and a tiny learning curve it's been pretty smooth sailing.

An example travis config: https://github.com/OperationCode/operationcode_bot/blob/mast...

rickr··on Ask HN: Who needs contributors? (October 2016)
Operation Code (http://operationcode.org)

Operation Code is an open source project that helps military, guard & reserve troops, veterans and their families get coding and building software to change the world.

We're overhauling the signup flow to make it easier for software mentors, new signups and contributors to get started.

HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails

https://github.com/operationcode/operationcode

https://github.com/OperationCode/operationcode/blob/master/C....

MIT

rickr··on Ask HN: Who needs contributors?
Operation Code (http://operationcode.org)

Operation Code is an open source project that helps military, guard & reserve troops, veterans and their families get coding and building software to change the world.

We're overhauling the signup flow to make it easier for software mentors, new signups and contributors to get started.

HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails

https://github.com/operationcode/operationcode

https://github.com/OperationCode/operationcode/blob/master/C...

MIT

rickr··on Cloud9 Acquired by Amazon
Using Firefox/Chrome on a linux box doesn't really compare to getting a dev environment setup.

For a rails app it's not a stretch to have to install postgres, rvm, ruby, some compiled gems, and redis. Then you need to make sure postgres and your rails server are running.

These aren't insurmountable and we can write documentation around it but compare that to 'Log into c9.io, copy this workspace and work on a ticket'.

I work with people that want to learn how to program and I hear feedback that getting an environment setup is overwhelming somewhat regularly. These online IDEs look like they can really combat that.

rickr··on People suck at technical interviews (2014)
As long as they didn't state you can't use external libs it IS a good solution.

Their response lets their team dynamic and environment shine through. They came across an unexpected but valid solution and instead of accepting their question was beaten within the rules they rejected it. I'd wager they didn't fix the wording of the question afterwords either.

rickr··on The Slack Platform Roadmap
The actual roadmap is here:

https://trello.com/b/ZnTQyumQ/slack-platform-roadmap

rickr··on We built a Twitter-powered robot who reads your tweets, and we're livestreaming it
FYI your page is empty of any content with ghostery enabled.
rickr··on Smoking Meat with the Internet of Things
My team at a recent Startup Weekend did this.

RasPI with a PID loop turning a fan on (increase heat)/off (decrease heat). The RasPI fed this into a backend server via websocket. We through a front end on to graph the temp, humidity etc. We could even set the temp and turn the fans on/off via the site.

rickr··on Phoenix 1.0
I haven't done much with Phoenix but I think there are a few libraries out there. I think addict is the front runner:

https://github.com/trenpixster/addict

https://github.com/opendrops/passport

Also here's a nice blog post that was in the elixir newsletter that may help!

http://nithinbekal.com/posts/phoenix-authentication/

rickr··on Ask HN: Time to update my skills. What should I do?
Learning a functional language (and way of thinking) was pretty enlightening to me.

I've also been looking into learning a bit about machine learning and data science via https://www.kaggle.com/. They run contests with some very interesting problems.

I don't know if these are the next 'big things' but i certainly don't regret learning them.

rickr··on Show HN: Publicize – PR for Startups
You've got a weird issue with your text/register button:

http://imgur.com/zbhpFY3

(FF 39 on a MBP)

rickr··on Soloshot: Automatically film outdoor activities without a camera operator
LeMons racer? That's the first application I thought of but when are you ever alone on track?

You could throw one or two of these in common passing places and combine that feed with in car video. You could get some really neat video.

rickr··on Ruby Is Defined by Terrible Tools
I've just started messing with elixir. It's a functional language that runs on the Erlang VM but it's syntax is ruby-ish.

I'm a newbie but I've been impressed by the tooling so far. And once you change how you think about everything the learning curve isn't too bad. =)

It has a rails-y framework that I haven't heard much about (and nothing particularly bad):

https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix

rickr··on Show HN: MUI – Lightweight CSS Framework for Material Design
Is there a compatible browser list?

Found it on github:

    IE10+  
    Latest Stable: Firefox, Chrome, Safari  
    iOS 6+
rickr··on Ask HN: Ok you've built a rudimentary prototype – how would you proceed next?
If you've got a basic prototype and something you can show people you should be out talking to potential customers seeing if they'll buy it. In talking to a bunch of potential customers you'll find out a ton of actionable info. What your competition doesn't do, why they're not interested in your competition, other closely related services they would pay for.
rickr··on Headphones are the new walls for people in open-plan offices
Not exactly what you're wanting but there was a poll a little while ago asking what people prefer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815512

rickr··on Choosing good names
Why do you think it's too much? I think it could probably be named a bit better but what's the downside to having a ~25 char method name?
rickr··on Jobstart – Personalized, expert guidance to land your next software job
Interesting idea!

Some UI feedback - the 'I agree/disagree' buttons on your mission component are kind of weird. I clicked on both just to see what would happen.

I think the CTA to sign up as an expert was a bit hard to find - perhaps due to the colors?

I'm also not sure why I would want to become an 'expert'. What's in it for me?

rickr··on Ask HN: To Bootstrap or Not to Bootstrap?
I've been using bootstrap for a while now too and lately I've been trying out new libraries just to see if anything is better yet. On feel alone I didn't love foundation.

For a project that required pretty heavy customization I ended up using skeleton/react (http://getskeleton.com/) and enjoyed it.

I saw Semantic UI on here the other day and I may end up trying that out on my next project: http://semantic-ui.com

rickr··on Asciinema
I added an RPM package to a project that used a Makefile to spin up a docker container which then built various packages via FPM:

https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

I didn't use the build system heavily and it may be more overhead than you'd like but I thought it was a pretty neat way of doing things. Repo is here:

https://github.com/tutumcloud/tutum-agent

rickr··on Ask HN: I have ssh, they have ssh, how can we chat?
talk has been around for like...30 years now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

rickr··on Show HN: An Isomorphic JavaScript Framework Faster Than React
If you don't mind me asking - how do you manage that? Do you use inline CSS a la https://speakerdeck.com/vjeux/react-css-in-js?
rickr··on Amateur Radio in Play in Aftermath of Nepal Earthquake
There's WinLink (http://www.winlink.org/) which is able to send email, photos, position reports etc over HF. It seems to be pretty healthy.
rickr··on Taking the Raspberry Pi 2 for a Test Drive with GNU Radio
You shouldn't need a yagi to listen to ham sats (transmit you will). A good external omnidirectional antenna should be fine.

In addition to the sats ISS always has at least one ham radio operator. They sometimes man the radio and make contacts with hams. In addition to THAT sometimes they operate SSTV (sending pictures via radio) that you would be able to pick up. Very cool stuff!

Here's a good site to see where hamsats are: http://www.amsat.org/

rickr··on The easiest way to use Docker on your Mac
I tried it out last time it showed up here. IIRC everything was tied to the registry (couldn't use my own non published images) so I went back to just using boot2docker.
rickr··on SpaceX CRS-6 Launch Webcast
Livestream link: http://livestream.com/spacex/events/3959775

Broadcast starts at 1615 est.

rickr··on SpaceX CRS-6 Launch
The launch is scheduled at 1633est with coverage starting at 1615est.
rickr··on The Easiest Way to Make an Industrial-Style Standing Desk
FYI: Your link has ); appended to it.

http://varidesk.com

I also had a varidesk and wasn't too fond of it. There was no real good way to place a keyboard/mouse on the tray and it was a bit wobbly for my tastes.

The product itself was well built, and it was very easy to move up and down though.

rickr··on Amazon Dash Button
I think time savings is the wrong way to think about this. I also don't think people are in the habit of ordering things as soon as they need them. I suspect the item goes onto a list (physical or not), which then has to be processed.

With this system instead of adding an item to your list to process later it's processed immediately.

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